sight and with the urging of several California agencies and legislators, the National Toxicology Program (NTP) has begun conducting a multimillion-dollar two-year rodent cancer study to resolve this uncertainty. The consequences of California’s regulatory decision are high. The recent movie Erin Brockovich popularized the story of a $333 million out-of-court settlement stemming from claims that Cr(VI), which leaked from PG&E facilities and contaminated groundwater in and around the southern California town of Hinkley, caused various illnesses, including cancer. Other suits potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars are still proceeding through the courts. California plans to review the literature again and propose a new draft public health goal for Cr(VI) this fall. Until that time the state will use the old 50 ppb total chromium standard, according to Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment spokesperson Alan Hirsch. The results of the NTP study are not expected until 2006. —REBECCA RENNER
Seabirds on Midway Atoll, a decommissioned Navy base that has been turned into a wildlife refuge, are being exposed to high levels of lead from deteriorating lead-based paint found on several of the islands’ former military buildings, according to research in this issue of ES&T (pp 3256–3260). Although the refuge is now the responsibility of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFW), the findings point to the need for better lead cleanup when military bases are shut down and used for other purposes. From early October until August, Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, which is located at the western end of the Hawaiian archipelago, is inhabited by hundreds of thousands of Laysan albatross seabirds. Space is at a premium, and many birds are forced to nest in close proximity to the abandoned buildings.
BRADFORD KEITT
Lead paint on former military bases poses risks to wildlife
Laysan albatross chicks have drooping wings from nesting near buildings with deteriorating lead-based paint on Midway.
Chicks that nest near these structures often develop acute lead poisoning and rarely survive, says Myra Finkelstein, a doctoral student at the University of California–Santa Cruz and lead author of the ES&T study. One of the most noticeable symptoms of lead exposure is a con-
News Briefs Delivering with fuel cells The U.S. EPA is teaming up with the UPS delivery service and DaimlerChrysler to test fuel-cell vehicles under real-world conditions in a project expected to begin later this year, the three organizations announced in May. The project will be based at EPA’s National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Mich. The first vehicle to go into service will be a passenger-sized test car based on the Daimler-Chrysler Mercedes-Benz A-Class, and it will be joined by at least one Dodge Sprinter van in 2004. The test delivery vehicles will be used in typical UPS delivery operations on established routes, so the project will allow the members of the government–industry partnership to evaluate fuel economy and driving performance under varying weather conditions. For more information, go to www.epa.gov/fuelcell.
Ontario to exceed ozone treaty target Canada’s Ontario province is projected to exceed by 44% a 2007 cap for ozone-causing nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions from the electricity sector, according to a new report by Synapse Energy Economics, a Cambridge, Mass., consulting firm. The report estimates that even with new selective catalytic reduction controls, emissions will total 56 kilotons (kt) in 2007. If the government replaced the two dirtiest coal-fired power plants, at Nanticoke and Lambton in southern Ontario, with combined cycle gas turbines, emissions would total 18.6 kt NOx in 2007, 52% below the 39-kt cap. A Clean Path to Ozone Annex Compliance: Phasing Out Ontario’s Coal-Fired Power Plants, written for the Sierra Club, is available at www.synapse-energy.com.
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Others are not so sure. John Froines, head of the University of California–Los Angeles’ Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, says that he quit the panel over worries about potential conflicts of interest among fellow members, that the report was rushed, and that the findings that there were no health risks associated with drinking Cr(VI) in water were too definite. “The issue is not that I think Cr(VI) has been shown to cause cancer,” Froines says. “But there is sufficient uncertainty that we can’t say there is no problem. How to address the uncertainties in the possible chromium-related cancers is an important public policy issue to be considered by state authorities.” In the past 10 years, California has become a crucible for the debate on chromium as the state crafts the nation’s first regulatory standard specifically for Cr(VI) in drinking water amid massive class action lawsuits. Previous drinking water standards have focused on total chromium, because of the difficulty in analyzing for Cr(VI). However, with no clear recommendation in
Environmental▼News dition called droopwing, in which lead affects the chicks’ peripheral nerves, making them unable to fly, says Finkelstein. “Every one of the chicks that I sampled around the buildings that had droopwing had very high lead levels,” she adds. Blood lead levels in the droopwing chicks averaged 440 micrograms per deciliter (µg/dL), while the levels in non-droopwing chicks near the building sites averaged 85 µg/dL and levels in chicks at a reference site more than 100 meters from any buildings averaged 6.0 µg/dL. To confirm that the lead poisoning is indeed being caused by leadbased paint and not other sources, such as spent lead shot, Finkelstein and her colleagues used a technique called lead isotopic fingerprinting, in which four naturally occurring isotopes of lead—204Pb, 206Pb, 207Pb, and 208Pb—are measured. Because the natural abundances of these four isotopes vary between different sources of lead, the analysis can be used to identify sources and pathways of exposure. The researchers analyzed paint chips from the chicks’ nests located near the building sites and com-
pared the lead isotopes with those found in the chicks’ blood. Sure enough, the isotopic analyses indicated that lead-based paint was the source of lead exposure. Surprisingly, the soil in the nests did not contain elevated levels of lead, except when the nests were visibly contaminated with paint chips, says Finkelstein. The results indicate that the chicks are being exposed primarily through ingestion of paint chips rather than from contaminated soil. The results are important for future lead cleanup efforts on Midway and elsewhere. USFW does have some money allocated this year for determining the extent of the lead problem on Midway, according to Lee Ann Woodward, an ecotoxicologist with USFW’s Pacific Islands Office in Honolulu, Hawaii. “Essentially, we are going to try to determine how much soil is contaminated with lead,” says Woodward. “Then next year, we will probably remove the soil, or in some areas, if it is possible, cover it up,” she says. The problem is that Midway has many burrowing birds, which will just stir up the soil again. “So we will
probably be doing large-scale removal,” she adds. It is unclear how much the removal process will cost, and that is one of the questions USFW is currently trying to answer. Before the Department of Defense turned Midway over to the Department of the Interior to be managed by USFW in 1997, the Navy did millions of dollars of remediation, says Woodward. “There was so much petroleum in the groundwater that they pumped it out for over a year.” As for the lead, she says, “they tried sandblasting the buildings, and one plan was to just seal it on the buildings.” Since then, there has been further deterioration of the paint on the buildings. “Essentially, the lead cleanup is going to have to be assessed and redone,” she says. Other decommissioned military bases are facing similar problems. Johnston Island, for example, which is located in the North Pacific Ocean southwest of Hawaii, has several buildings with lead-based paint, says Finkelstein. “It is difficult to get rid of.” The island is expected to be transferred to USFW in 2004 and become a wildlife refuge as well. —BRITT E. ERICKSON
Hospitals can reduce their emissions of particulate matter (PM) by 80% and heavy metals by at least 50% if they adopt rigorous segregation practices, according to research published in the July 15 issue of ES&T (pp 3152–3157). The findings also raise questions about the data that both the European Environmental Agency (EEA) and the U.S. EPA compile to comply with the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP). Hospitals are required to segregate hazardous medical wastes because of the biological risks these materials pose. But how hospitals deal with these materials, as well as nonhazardous wastes, varies considerably from country to country. In the United States, medical waste is segregated using three categories: “pathological”, which includes
human organs and bodily fluids; “red bag”, which covers infectious wastes; and “general trash”. EEA distinguishes only between “specific hospital waste” and “other hospital waste”; Portugal, on the other hand, defines four groups of medical waste. These differing classifications of medical waste in signatory countries prevent the accurate comparison of the composition of incinerated medical wastes at an international level, says Maria Conceição Alvim-Ferraz, assistant professor at the University of Porto’s Laboratory of Process, Environment and Energy Engineering in Portugal and first author of the ES&T study. This is important because the LRTAP Convention requires countries to report emission factors, which are calculated as ra-
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DIGITAL VISION
Study questions medical incineration emissions data
How hospitals handle medical waste makes a significant contribution to their nations’ air pollution emissions.
tios between emission rate and waste feed rate. “Published emission factors, such as those given by EEA or EPA, are provided as general defaults to inventory compilers, where no national data is available,” says Haydn Jones of AEA Technology Environment in Culham, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, who is responsible for
